One way Trip for Homeless

Using $25,000 confiscated from criminals, Fort Lauderdale is offering to buy one-way bus tickets for homeless people whose families will care for them at the other end of the trip, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports.

"We're not pushing them out," Mayor Jack Seiler said. "If somebody has a network of support, a group of family and friends that will provide for them back home, that's probably a good place for them to be."

Commissioners voted to create a Homeless Reunification Program through the police department's homeless-outreach unit, which had placed more than 7,000 people in shelters and housing through August. The city says 190 families with children who were living on the streets were still waiting for openings in early September.

Under the bus-ticket program, a homeless person or family must have a family member willing to pick them up at their final destination, and they can use the program only once.

Broward and Palm Beach counties have had similar programs for years.

Some homeless advocates say the programs merely pander to voters rather than address the problem.

"I think cities that embark on that as a course of action, like Fort Lauderdale, like New York City, like San Francisco, the nature of that is quite transparent, to move their problem onto somebody else's doorstep," Neil Donovan, executive director of the National Homeless Coalition, told the Sun Sentinel ahead of the Tuesday vote.

Broward County arranges between five and 10 trips a week but at the moment has a backlog of about 100 requests, the Broward/Palm Beach New Times says.

America is in an extremely precarious situation regarding homelessness. With the high unemployment rate, job elimination/outsourcing, and the current socioeconomic state, we are two to three paychecks away from homelessness ourselves. This issue gives us all a cause to be extremely alarmed. I am deeply fearful for this country. No one should be homeless, it is against human dignity!

Ah, the epitome of Westernized culture! If you can't solve it; then dump it! And once you dump it; hope that people forget about it. We've been playing this band-aid “solution” game for the past 50 years. Sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost.

I have a friend who used to work for a state run program that did this in Hawaii. Due to the high cost of living there and the fact that you have to fly or take a really expensive boat trip to get off the islands, many who become homeless are then stranded there and can't get to family on the mainland. My friend helped doing outreach and getting people connected to the program so that their families could be contacted and for those who had family that would give them a home upon their return, the state gives them a plane ticket to get there.

On the other hand, when I lived in SF, CA in the nineties, it became common knowledge that a significant percentage of the city's homeless had been people deemed low-risk and released from mental institutions on the East Coast during budget cuts of the 70s and shipped West with one-way bus tickets.

Before sending them to whatever family - the family is called first to see if they even what that person back home and if the family can afford to help this person. A lot of homeless teenagers are throwaway kids. Or kids that have runaway to avoid abuse at home.

So saying "Go Home" is not always the solution. Perhaps the whole family is poor and had to part out the kids to relatives. Maybe the homeless teenager wants to become a emancipated minor - a good kid that wants to get away from his dope fiend parent(s).

The state does this because it cheaper to ship them to a different state than to put folks on SSI & food stamps. It is dumping when the first question they ask you at the shelter is "Do you have family that can help you?" Makes a person feel unwanted just a little more .... dejected.

Maybe a little xenophobic too when the parents are other nationalities yet the child is a natural citizen born in the USA

I keep getting shut down from the homeless villages proposal here in Canada. A plan that gives homeless people ownership of a tiny healthy house that dose not cost the Government a dime, This Government would rather send 60 t0 75 thousands dollars on jailing them and hospitalizing homeless each year. Homeless outnumber public servant here, I wish true democracy would work in this case. Maybe they find it cheaper to kill them rather than to house them long term.

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